Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Jon Kilgannon's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, January 1st, 2030
12:00 am	Communications Center People are apparently using this journal as a general contact location for me. If you have something to say and don't want to use email, you can post it here, I guess. Consider that it's publicly readable before you write about a plan for conquering Latvia. :) Current Mood: talkative (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 28th, 2011
3:22 pm	Hurricane Irene The Great East Coast Hurricane of 2011 (I am preemptively naming it in the fashion of the neo-medieval chroniclers who will follow us after the disastrous Great Vowel Shift of 2106) passed over us, spawning a tornado to our south and many inches of rain on our head. The basement is flooded, but thanks to my spending the last four or five days preparing, everything was up on shelves. Executive Summary, quoting Han Solo: "Uh...everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you?" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
9:28 am	The Gift of Fire The teacher and writer Richard Mitchell gave a speech in 1986 in which he said that Prometheus gave a greater gift than could be predicted when he stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. Before that moment, mankind had reacted to events. After it, we acted on our own, defining who we would be. Mitchell said that the moon is beautiful, shining with a serene light. But the moon shines by reflected light from the sun. The sun makes its own light; the moon's beautiful shine is "provided," Mitchell said, "by another power," the fires of the sun. He ended his speech with what he called a command to his listeners: Don't shine. Don't seek to shine. Burn. My friend John Scofield didn't just shine, he burned. I wish I had spoken to him more often. He whom the gods love dies young. Current Mood: sad (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 2nd, 2010
6:24 pm	What I Did on Ivy's Summer Vacation Day 1: Drop Ivy off at the airport to visit her family for Passover. Drive home and get back to work. Day 2: Work. The home office is quiet without Ivy around. ( And then it got strange ) Current Mood: hungry (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 27th, 2009
9:46 pm	The House with Encyclopedia Walls My friend Matt has a copy of The Big U by Neal Stephenson, a first edition. This is important, because the book had one printing in 1984 and then fell off the face of the Earth until it was reprinted in 2001. Matt's copy of the book was sold to him in a small, flat paper bag which fits it perfectly, like a slipcover. I was one of several people who borrowed Matt's copy in the late 1980s, and each of us treated the book with care because it would be impossible to find a replacement. (This was in the days before immediate access to purchase out-of-print books via the Internet, when you had to take potluck in a used book store.) The paper slipcover acted to remind those who borrowed the book that it was irreplaceable. I last saw his copy a few years ago while he was cleaning his house before a party, and it was in the bag, that same bag, and still in near-mint condition. Stephenson himself is a very odd writer. He writes like someone whipped Vernor Vinge and Hunter S. Thompson into the Large Hadron Collider at a significant fraction of the speed of plot. His fiction is full of references to philosophy, popular culture, and history, until one gets the idea that he rises every morning and reads a volume of "Encyclopedia of Neuropathology" before breakfast. When he finishes one set of encyclopedias he moves on to another, even more specialized, set. He builds his house out of the volumes he has finished reading. Okay, I made that last sentence up. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
3:54 am	Don't Laugh at the Crinoline, She Has a Gun Mark is off to a well-earned rest and left the comic to me to update. It's here as usual. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
11:27 pm	Being More Animated Narrated by June Foray, written by an animation icon who worked on "Duck Dodgers" and "What's Opera, Doc"...how can you lose? The Pumpkin of Nyefar. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 13th, 2008
8:00 pm	My Useless Day I was intending to go to a meeting today but awakened with a headache which can best be described as "Trodgor wants to escape from inside my skull so that he may burninate the local countryside." Instead I took a nap (which helped somewhat), and now I'm exploding Internet spaceships in Eve Online. This has me considering changing the name of my battleship to "Trogdor" now.... (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 27th, 2008
2:57 am	And Then Vader Turned Out To Be Everyone's Father, Really Since Mark has gone to bed (he spent way too many hours drawing today's comic) he asked me to update the page. Which I have done, voila! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 21st, 2008
1:00 am	Philcon 2008 Schedule I'm a guest at the seventy-millionth* Philcon Science Fiction Convention. My schedule is: Fri 9:00 PM in Plaza III (1 hour) Survivability of Electronically Published Material Sat 11:00 PM in Plaza I (1 hour) Bad Anime, Bad! Sun 10:00 AM in Crystal Ballroom Three (1 hour) World Conquest and Then What? Sun 3:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Three (1 hour) Making Money Off of Your Webcomic * Seriously. It's been running yearly since before the K-T Event. At the first Philcon, the guests of honor were Tyrannosaurus Rex and Isaac Asimov. They debated whether or not Heinlein's politics were too old-fashioned. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 14th, 2008
9:42 pm	The Dumbest Guys in the Room The guy who wrote about the excesses of 1980s Wall Street in Liar's Poker now writes about the causes of the current financial meltdown in "The End". ( Longish quote inside. ) Current Mood: disappointed (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
5:25 pm	Weird Science We interrupt your regularly scheduled election to bring you news of science. Be sure to read the comments section at the end for further discussion. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
5:25 am	It Was Twenty Years Ago Today / Sgt. Pepper Taught the Band to Play Twenty years ago, give or take a week, I met the woman who is now my wife. I remember it vividly - she was in the doorway of a dorm room, wearing a tee-shirt and jeans, and was introduced to me by someone I was with - but she doesn't recall meeting me again until a year later. This makes sense, I suppose; other than my height, I'm not particularly memorable. She, on the other hand, has eyes that make my brain actually stop functioning for a moment when I see them. We started dating a few years after that meeting in the doorway. Married a few years after that. She's been with me as a couple for fifteen years, and I sure as heck don't deserve her. Happy sort-of-anniversary, beloved. May the next twenty years be just as amazing. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
5:29 pm	Space Geekery Ahead. Happy 50th Anniversary, NASA! (Comment on this)
Friday, September 12th, 2008
3:59 am	Secret Aaaaaagent Man Test your skills to see if you can be an image analyst for Australian intelligence. No, I'm not making that up. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
3:39 pm	They've Taken the Hobbits to Jenkintown Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) is making a film that's set and partially shot in my hometown. Yes, I'm always the last to notice these things. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
2:48 am	Afterlife Blues Mark is out at a conference, um, conferring, so I'll take his usual place and mention that Afterlife Blues has been updated. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
2:08 am	Seven Habits of Highly Defective Economies The folding green in my wallet makes me a trillionaire four times over in Zimbabwe's currency, according to CNN. The official Zimbabwean inflation rate is 2.2 million percent, so in a short time I'll be a quadillionaire or Zimbabwe will have been purchased by South Africa using the spare change they found in the couch. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
3:28 am	What Heist Were You Watching? It is hard to overstate the awesomeness that is Joss Whedon's new Internet-only project Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It stars Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion, involves goofy mad science and singing, and is free. Go thou and watch. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, July 14th, 2008
3:14 am	Afterlife Blues Look, kids! Comics! (afterlifeblues.com) The next graphic novel written by me and drawn by the inimitable Mark Sachs launched on Sunday night. We expect the Hollywood agents to start calling any day now with movie offers! ...Any day now. *crickets* Current Mood: accomplished (9 Comments |Comment on this)